Even if you’re not familiar with Big Hero 6, a comic series and Disney movie, or the recent Disney+ show Baymax!, the robot Baymax might look familiar. He’s a six-foot-two-inch, round, white, inflatable robot nurse with a carbon-fiber skeleton. Tasked with healthcare duties, Baymax calmly cares for his patients. He supports a middle-school student who gets her period for the first time. He helps a cat that has accidentally swallowed a wireless earbud. And though Baymax constantly gets poked with holes and must reinflate himself, he is still a great healthcare provider. He also makes a great pal.
Soft robots already exist, as do most of the pieces that you’d need to create a big, friendly Baymax. But putting them all together to form a robot that we would want to have in our homes is another story.
“There’s all kinds of things that need to come together to make something as amazing as Baymax,” says Alex Alspach. He’s a roboticist at Toyota Research Institute in Cambridge, Mass. He also worked for Disney Research and helped develop the movie version of Baymax. To build a real Baymax, he says, roboticists will need to address not only hardware and software, but also human-robot interaction and the design or aesthetics of the robot.
The software — Baymax’s brain, basically — might be something like Alexa or Siri, so that it gives personalized responses to each patient. But giving Baymax such a smart, humanlike mind will be hard. Building the body will probably be simpler, Alspach suspects. Still, even that will come with challenges.
Building Baymax
The first challenge will be keeping the robot’s weight down. Baymax is a big bot. But he needs to be lightweight to help…
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